The little boxes will make you angry

Sarah Jane and Jo Grant-Jones didn't get to voice their disappointment with being completely dumped for so many years until NuWho and SJA.

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It's a bit inaccurate to say Jo was "dumped" since she chose to stop travelling with the Doctor. I think her main issue was that the Doctor never checked in on her in all the years since.

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Oh, absolutely, looking at it rationally, she left the Doctor, but, yea, he didn't leave a number, and never visited again, makes you feel really inadequate, compared to Rose and then Sarah Jane (with her three NuWho Doctor Adventures), and now Amy/River. *Of course, any Classic Companion could claim this "Abandonment", and that was kinda the point, it didn't really register until NuWho.

All I can really think is that this episode should have been a two-parter. I enjoyed everything until the ending, which was incredibly rushed, and I felt that the bad guy came out of left field. Who are these aliens? Why do they want to kill the humans? Why do we give a shit? Oh, and the ship is automated, so the Doctor can just wave his screwdriver at a computer screen and make everything better. Really lame. The episode should have ended right after they boarded the alien ship with a big TO BE CONTINUED.

Sarah Jane and Jo Grant-Jones didn't get to voice their disappointment with being completely dumped for so many years until NuWho and SJA.

Click to expand...

It's a bit inaccurate to say Jo was "dumped" since she chose to stop travelling with the Doctor. I think her main issue was that the Doctor never checked in on her in all the years since.

Click to expand...

Oh, absolutely, looking at it rationally, she left the Doctor, but, yea, he didn't leave a number, and never visited again, makes you feel really inadequate, compared to Rose and then Sarah Jane (with her three NuWho Doctor Adventures), and now Amy/River. *Of course, any Classic Companion could claim this "Abandonment", and that was kinda the point, it didn't really register until NuWho.

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I feel like I remember Eleven telling Jo Grant that he visited all of the former companions, even if they didn't know he was doing so, in the Sara Jane Adventures episode he guest starred in?

The implication being that Ten(nant!) visited every one of them in those last minutes of "The End of Time" and we only were privy to the companions from nuWho at the time.

Jo got to voice her frustration, and Eleven pointed out that he had checked up on her, she just didn't know it.

I gave it top marks for character development, good script and lots of fun... However, it was wrapped up far too quickly for my taste. Could have been a nice two parter and made the threat more, well, threatening.

I thought it was a pretty good episode. I wasn't too fussed about the lackluster enemy or the rushed conclusion; they were really only there because convention dictates that there must be some kind of wacky sci-fi problem. The episode was really about the Ponds and the Doctor, and IMO it excelled in that regard. Looking forward to this weekend.

^Regardless, I tweeted SPACE that they should change that onscreen graphic to say MID-Season Finale.

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It's a little more complicated than that. There are indications that the production team is treating the Amy episodes and the Oswin episodes as two entirely different series, just shot in one production cycle. Tom Spillsbury recently set Ian Levine off on Twitter when he referred to the just-finished script for the post-Christmas episode as a the first episode of the next series. Worldwide is telling their merchandising partners that the first five are separate from Christmas and beyond. I'm honestly surprised that the DVD packaging for the first five calls it "Series Seven Part 1" because that's not what Worldwide has told people it was going to be called; according to e-mails i've received at work, Christmas and beyond is being called "Series Eight."

I don't know if it's a similar situation to how we do things here in the US, but it could be like what happened on my show last year - we were picked up for a sixth season (13 episodes) fulfilling the original contracts that had been negotiated with our actors; in the middle of our production cycle, the network ordered an additional ten episodes, which we (internally and not on paper) referred to as "Season 7" because we had no idea when they would air.

As it turned out, the network only let five weeks go by in between these two batches of episodes, so it was genuinely a "Season 6, Part 1" and "Season 6, Part 2" for us... but my point is simply it could be a matter of actor contracts and salaries. In our case, we lobbed everything under the nomenclature of "Season 6" in order to keep all our actors and to pay them the same rates; had we officially (and on paper) called it "Season 7" we would have had to renegotiate with everyone in the cast and on top of that everyone on staff who would be returning would be entitled to a 3% bump in their paychecks.

But that's all on an American show. I have no idea how it works on BBC series, but it is something to consider -- with Gillan and Darvill leaving, it could just be that even though it's technically a "new" season (as in, series 8), they've for all intents and purposes been referring to it as and keeping it as "Series 7" so as not to have to renegotiate with Smith or any of the other production crew who might otherwise be entitled to pay raises.